The Essay on Education is expressly for the use of gentlemen, since “if that class be properly tended the rest will follow of course.” The child, he says, should have much air and exercise, should be accustomed to little sleep and early habits. That superstitious terrors, and the frequent use of the rod should be carefully avoided; that the boy should be used to suffer pain gradually, to harden him, but not as a punishment; that the parents’ authority should be perfect over the child, and be gradually taken off, till the relation between them becomes a confiding friendship; that particular attention be paid to his manners, so that his courage, learning, wit, plainness, and good-nature, do not turn to brutality, pedantry, buffoonery, rusticity, and fawning. He says, that the child’s curiosity should be encouraged; that he should learn by games, and his attainments never be forced; that he should not be left to flounder in difficulties, but helped through them. Locke prefers a careful tutor to a public school: he says that a boy stands a better chance of being both virtuous and well-bred under the care of the former. What he should know is Latin, Greek, a little mathematics, how to keep accounts; the less of logic the better; he should write a good hand; and a virtuous youth so bred, “one may turn loose into the world with great assurance that he will find employment and esteem everywhere.” He further recommends that the boy should travel between the ages of eight and sixteen, rather than between sixteen and twenty one; and that when he comes of age he had better not marry according to the usual custom, but wait some years, that his children “may not tread too closely on his heels.” The habit of Locke’s mind was perhaps originally severe; but from constant social intercourse with men of all characters and opinions, was rendered mild and equable. Nothing seems to have provoked him into a loss of temper so much as being forced into argument with professed logicians. He calls the logical method taught at Oxford an ill, if not the worst way of acquiring knowledge and seeking truth. He was fond of the society of children, and would enter into the enjoyments of riper youth with facility. He was entrusted by his patron with the education and marriage of his son, who was the father of the author of the ‘Characteristics.’ The latter nobleman (the third Earl of Shaftesbury) owed much to Locke’s care, and was his eulogist.